Altruism

Theory

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice — which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction — which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value — and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

It is your mind that they want you to surrender — all those who preach the
creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand
it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another
life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: “It
is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of
others” — end up by saying: “It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must
sacrifice them to the convictions of others.”

Now there is one word — a single word — which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand — the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it — and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.

It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it — or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their victims — realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible.

Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others — it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others — it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch — it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself — it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice — it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness — non-existence — as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw — the zero.

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil — that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of [the altruist] morality does to a
man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy: he has
nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted
pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he
can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves
for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows
that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure-and that,
morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen
Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself.
Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he
possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has
nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is
only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded
either as evil or, at best, amoral.

Even though altruism declares that “it is more blessed to give than to
receive,” it does not work that way in practice. The givers are never blessed;
the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and
insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism’s virtues (or
for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue;
it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism’s stock in
trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation. If
the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he
might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing. Altruists are
concerned only with those who suffer — not with those who provide relief from
suffering, not even enough to care whether they are able to survive. When no
actual suffering can be found, the altruists are compelled to invent or
manufacture it.

Some unphilosophical, eclectic altruists, invoking such concepts as “inalienable rights,” “personal freedom,” “private choice,” have claimed that service to others, though morally obligatory, should not be compulsory. The committed, philosophical altruists, however, are consistent: recognizing that such concepts represent an individualist approach to ethics and that this is incompatible with the altruist morality, they declare that there is nothing wrong with compulsion in a good cause — that the use of force to counteract selfishness is ethically justified — and more: that it is ethically mandatory.

Every man, they argue, is morally the property of others — of those others it is his lifelong duty to serve; as such, he has no moral right to invest the major part of his time and energy in his own private concerns. If he attempts it, if he refuses voluntarily to make the requisite sacrifices, he is by that fact harming others, i.e., depriving them of what is morally theirs — he is violating men’s rights, i.e., the right of others to his service — he is a moral delinquent, and it is an assertion of morality if others forcibly intervene to extract from him the fulfillment of his altruist obligations, on which he is attempting to default. Justice, they conclude, “social justice,” demands the initiation of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality — with the
code of self-sacrifice — is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism,
Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be
immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent
embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way
that that morality can ever be practiced.

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism
is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One
cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial
animal.

From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the
altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are
philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same
society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is
clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its
consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth — or
the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute
force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.

It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon.
Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe
for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s
perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological:
the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without
tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of
self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal
value-they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice — they have
no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth,
personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea. When they
hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must
renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their
leaders — the theoreticians of altruism — know better. Immanuel Kant knew it;
John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner knows it; John Rawls knows it. Observe that
it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit,
self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy.

The advocates of mysticism are motivated not by a quest for truth, but by
hatred for man’s mind; . . . the advocates of altruism are motivated not by
compassion for suffering, but by hatred for man’s life.

The psychological results of altruism may be observed in the fact that a great many people approach the subject of ethics by asking such questions as: “Should one risk one’s life to help a man who is: a) drowning, b) trapped in a fire, c) stepping in front of a speeding truck, d) hanging by his fingernails over an abyss?” Consider the implications of that approach. If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance):

Lack of self-esteem — since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.

Lack of respect for others--since he regards mankind as a herd of doomed beggars crying for someone’s help.

A nightmare view of existence — since he believes that men are trapped in a “malevolent universe” where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.

And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality — since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.

By elevating the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics, altruism has destroyed the concept of any authentic benevolence or good will among men. It has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others — that to value another means to sacrifice oneself — that any love, respect or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrificial blank check signed over to his loved ones.

The men who accept that dichotomy but choose its other side, the ultimate products of altruism’s dehumanizing influence, are those psychopaths who do not challenge altruism’s basic premise, but proclaim their rebellion against self-sacrifice by announcing that they are totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver (who is usually one of their own kind).

[Intellectual appeasement] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: “I’m not an outsider! I’m your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind — I’m using it only in order to serve you!”

Whatever remnants of personal value he may preserve after a deal of that kind, self-esteem is not one of them.

Such decisions are seldom, if ever, made consciously. They are made gradually, by subconscious emotional motivation and semi-conscious rationalization. Altruism offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishness, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked.

The injunction “don’t judge” is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent — one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil — one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.